![]() “The melody and the function of the song underline the fact that anxiety is circular.” ![]() And we thought, anxiety is circular, so we wrote about circles, made it baroque,” he said. It was supposed to be a song about anxiety, and so we got a lovely melody from the composer Michel Legrand, who was also a dramatist. Norman Jewison - he had the scene where Steve McQueen is flying his glider around, and he’s just planned the robbery. “You know it was for that great movie,” he said, referring to The Thomas Crown Affair. “But there are song lyrics that are very poetic.”īut let’s take “Windmills of Your Mind,” as a kind of argument: “Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own / Down a hollow to a cavern where the sun has never shone / Like a door that keeps revolving in a half-forgotten dream.” Bergman chuckled a little, hearing it read out loud. Yeats, laughing loudly at the suggestion. Alan won’t hear of much overlap between his own work and W.B. Like many other songwriters, the Bergmans think poems and lyrics are two different things. “Besides, we prefer to write for a melody.” I never had the ego to do that,” he said. “At first, I wrote music and lyrics, but later we worked with composers. He and Marilyn began writing in the 1950s. “I’ll tell you one thing, though: If you grew up Jewish in those days, you took piano lessons whether you wanted to or not,” he laughed.Īlan came out to UCLA and studied with the great Johnny Mercer, who wrote “Too Marvelous for Words,” among many, many others. There must have been something in the water.” Much of the Bergmans’ success is directly linked to Streisand, including “The Way We Were,” as well as the music for Yentl, but Alan admits that there’s something almost clichéd about Brooklyn as musician breeding ground. “In fact, Barbra Streisand went to the same school, too. “We went to the same high school in Brooklyn, though we didn’t meet until we came out to California,” he said. Courtesy PhotoĪlan and Marilyn weren’t always together, though they should have been. ![]() Alan will perform an evening of music at the Lobero on May 17. “Do you think people will come?” POWER COUPLE: Alan Bergman (left) and his wife, Marilyn Bergman, work at the piano. “We’ve been working together since, well, let’s just say for 58 years.”Īlan will share the fruits of his half century of marital bliss and musical collaboration with the Lobero audience next Saturday night, and Marilyn will be out in the house. And Alan is first to admit he couldn’t have done it without her. She’s fine with me being up there.” Of course, by songs he means their songs, the great tunes that he and his better half wrote together: big, famous numbers like “The Way We Were” and “The Windmills of Your Mind.” They even wrote the theme music for the classic TV show Maude (“Isadora was the first bra burner”). “There are one or two of the songs she likes to sing, but that’s all. Alan Bergman performs alone, but his wife, Marilyn Bergman, doesn’t mind.
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